Biggest letdown in the game...

[blinky77]

- The game is pretty anti-climactic, it doesn't get any bit harder between Tier 4 and the NFS World Tour.
- "Bulldozer" effect when hitting a car from behind.
- The control scheme could have been better, or at least allowed to put shifting on square and circle. This is why I run Auto transmission in the game.
- Some slowdown effects in the game (Autopolis GP has one that's pretty noticeable).

These are all pretty minor flaws though that can easily be fixed in the next game. I liked it better than Race Driver GRID. That said I'd probably find myself enjoying GT5 and Forza 3 more, because of the higher replay value.

 

[stepvan]

Ok, a couple of minor flaws:
I'm not a hard core racer and so I dont know the layout of every track and so I do use the track map, I would be happy if the little chevron which represents yourself was a different colour from the other little ticks and dash's etcetra.
Also i use the bonnet view mostly and the times of you and your fellow racers in top left corner tend to have the background of the sky, and this also is difficult to see because the information is in white.

 

[niky]

Oh... not to mention the fact that sometimes the carat is hidden under the gauges on the HUD in bumper cam... but that's a minor niggle... after five to ten laps, you should basically have the track memorized.

I've been playing racing games since PS1 came out, and NOW NFS is going to try to force me to use R2, of all buttons for throttle? and L2 for brakes? How the hell am I supposed to shift without letting off the gas? SQUARE?!?!? So I have to use the analog stick, which I prefer, ok, now you're wondering, so what's his gripe? I'll tell you, everytime I accidentally push in R3, I go to some stupid friends screen, and cut away from the race. This is so fing stupid, I can't even believe it. And there is NOTHING I can do to fix it. NOTHING.

The analog mapping (config3) is great... but this is my biggest gripe... WHO THE HELL STARTS A CHAT IN THE MIDDLE OF A ****ING RACE? I actually thought that the PS3 was trying to autologin during gameplay and turned off autologin and reset the system... three times... until I figured out what was happening.

Having a chat button active while racing is more than annoying... it's pointless to the point of pointlessness. Why can't the chat function be attached to the pause screen? Hmmm?

Cockpit clattering noises (like in car viewing a WRC rally car) are really irritating and not real, unless it is a rally car.

You drive a street car over a kerbing in anger, and it'll clatter. Hit the kerbing hard enough, and it'll clatter all the way home.

 

[markao]

Besides the probs with the tuning option, or lack of, my biggest letdown is in TA mode.

Why oh why, does the clock start when you get controll and not when you pass the S&F line. No idea why they limited to 5 minutes either, but the combination of the two make a hotlap around the Nordschleife in that mode useless

,

 

[niky]

One lap isn't enough, yeah... but it's not bad.

 

[LR-PR-ProtoX]

My biggest disappointment has to be Online. They could have easily made an option to choose for precision drivers, agression drivers aka durby or both. On the precision rooms if somebody hit you, it would take away pr points from them everytime. I think that would at least stop the wreck festival but i still would enforce it by giving a big penalty or out a vote at the end agaist that player, if he or she caused too much wrecking, make that race count as a loser, meaning no points awarded for him. Crossing my fingers for un uodste on this, very unlikely this will happen still i have high hopes.

 

[Biggles]

The online should work out fine, you're just going to have race with people you know. On the positive side, so far the online seems to be totally lag-free, which is a BIG plus. 👍

 

[Blitz187]

My biggest disappointment has to be Online. They could have easily made an option to choose for precision drivers, agression drivers aka durby or both. On the precision rooms if somebody hit you, it would take away pr points from them everytime. I think that would at least stop the wreck festival but i still would enforce it by giving a big penalty or out a vote at the end agaist that player, if he or she caused too much wrecking, make that race count as a loser, meaning no points awarded for him. Crossing my fingers for un uodste on this, very unlikely this will happen still i have high hopes.

Until they bring out a patch for this (maybe). The only advice/workaround I can think of is to only race with people you know... I havent even been in a public room yet... I always race with the people in my friends list and then youre gauranteed a "clean" race... Since the game does in a way promote aggressive/bad driving its inevitable that online will also be destruction derby.. and if someone is classified as an aggressive driver Id like to meet them because I cannot think of anyway someone would get more aggression points than precision in this game, unless they were REALLY only out to punt and shunt...

Edit: Biggles beat me to it... You sly devil you..

 

[mani_23]

Not only was nfs:Shift a Huge letdown for the controls reason, but It pretty much has no value..
I dont know about you guys, But Haven't you thought EVERY CAR FEELS AND SOUNDS THE SAME?! It gets on my nerves, when I bought my 370, thinking it would be such a huge improvement over the honda civic si I had. But no, the cars essentially all sound the same (Especially sound the same, when you up the performance too). Even more but although the understeer I had with the civic was gone, It still felt all the same, The weight, The suspension. I will put this in direct comparison to Gt5rologue, I Loved it even more than gt4 because every car even felt MORE different than another (even though gt4 did it very well). In need for speed it seemed that all they did was just put in the statistic to make another car: Faster, Lighter, Better brakes, And put better handling by (In their probable words) "Easier to turn" (Since we all Know that nfs threw the simulator Direction Out a long while ago!), meaning Better handling.
Theres the one whistling noise that comes stock with every car you buy, even if its a VW scirroco. I mean Look, Im pretty damn sure my cousins Honda civic most certainly not make a whistling noise like Super Gt vehicle would, going 120k on the highway. I know so too.

Overall I think Its a broken game, The menus, the options (Like the controller issues) were all very "Cheap" Feeling. The game most certainly not feel like a Simulator at all, and the physics were crappy (Although I think the damage was well over par).
I Didn't Intend on ranting about this when I saw this forum, but after so many people saying its such a good game, I was forced to.

p.s, Other than the damage I also think the online was good, But In all Honestly, NFS should stick to arcade, I Doubt they can make a descent simulator again after over a decade.

 

[LeftyWright69]

man did you have ta dig up this time sensitive thred that had to do with the relese of the game before the game was embraced by the people who can tell the difference. Your inexperence w/ the game is truly evedent and your standing alone. Let this thred die

 

[Terronium-12]

man did you have ta dig up this time sensitive thred that had to do with the relese of the game before the game was embraced by the people who can tell the difference. Your inexperence w/ the game is truly evedent and your standing alone. Let this thred die

And what difference would that be?

The game still sucks by a great margin; the bouncing shouldn't exist, the constant oversteer and powersliding shouldn't exist (at least not to the degree it's exaggerated upon in the game)...it's just a broken mechanic. I can't even play the game longer than five minutes anymore as I'll just want to toss the disc straight into a wall.

PGR4 has better physics than Shift, and it's a full-on arcade racer.

 

[LeftyWright69]

Game stop will buy your game from you if it's not a PC game and you won't have to ever have to deal with the game again. Ebay or Craigs list is also a great place to sell your game. I know that the game is not perfect but mani's post came after a post that was like 6 mo. old. Those kinds of post were everyware at that time and are nowhare to be found now, for the most part because most of those people sold their games or stoped playing and don't have post purchase syndrome. My coment mostly delt with mani's insite as the cars not having any difference, I beg to differ.

 

[boxox]

I wish there was some award Shift could get for funniest whinges

 

[mani_23]

I Apologize for my extremely late post, In any case, The Cars defenitely all feel the same. Its like the cars Use all the same suspension. The cars have exxagerated oversteer or low understeer, Its one of the two. Never in the middle, never 75%. If the car has RWD It has exaggerated oversteer (Like every other nfs game), If the car has FWD it wont have little or alot of understeer, It will have a set amount, through every fWD Car there is.
Unfortunately the AWD Cars seem that they all have the torque distribution like 20/80, (Which they should also set an option to set).
They all feel the same.
The sounds are also unrealistic too (posted in my last comment).
The game Introduced a cockpit view, a huge comeback since the early need for speed games, Yet the Sounds seem to be strictly from the whine of the engine, directly. And Other than the Lamborghini's and Bugatti's, You certainly dont hear the noise of the engine as strong in a honda civic (Again I know for a fact, because of my cousins Civic). They dont alter the effects for each car.
Cars flip, thats enough to be said, They flip as if they are made of 100% Carbon fiber. Every one of them, My db9 got flipped by an AIs 350z.. Whilst later I Also Flipped him in my db9, It all turned out to be the same whether your hitting a car thats over 700 pounds lighter than you, or somebodys hitting your car, which is 700 pounds heavier than him!. I Get the regular generic need for speed shift style flip that I hope we all have felt before, were your screen turns to a blur, You dont really feel the flip (In cockpit view) and where you land 200 meters foreward on the track.

Every car feels the same.
I Certainly have played the game. I Own it. And I only got it with my driving force gt, both of them for $95 was a steal, and I didn't really care if it would be good or bad. I guess now I've turned a bit passionate about it. I guess I'l Have to wait till Gt5 to use the wheel, Cause like previous need for speed games like Carbon, and Underground. This still feels the same, especially on the wheel.
It just feels a bit heavier,but not enough to even say it is a "Cross-simulation"

And what difference would that be?

The game still sucks by a great margin; the bouncing shouldn't exist, the constant oversteer and powersliding shouldn't exist (at least not to the degree it's exaggerated upon in the game)...it's just a broken mechanic. I can't even play the game longer than five minutes anymore as I'll just want to toss the disc straight into a wall.

PGR4 has better physics than Shift, and it's a full-on arcade racer.

Definitely agree with this, It is a broken mechanic, and enough to say pgr4 WAS a simulation.

 

[niky]

I certainly thought they all felt the same back when I was playing it... but if I concentrated really hard, and as long as I drove properly, I could find differences that went beyond the "stiffer/softer, over/under" type.

The problem is the point at which the game encourages you to drive 11/10ths, and the way it allows you to easily control excessive understeer and intentional oversteer.

 

[Imari]

Am I the only one that thinks the crazy powerslide physics aren't a problem?

In my experience, it's a slower way to take a corner than driving it properly (or with the tyres squealing in this case, but not hanging the arse out). Seems to me that they managed to get two physics styles into one engine.

One, you like the drifting thing and so you can do that fairly easily, but you'll be a little slower and it's not exactly realistic. Let's be fair, the amount of people worried about the drifting characteristics of a Zonda has to be pretty low.
Two, you wanna race properly, and if you don't push into the drifting zone you'll only see a reasonably decent physics simulation.

Many of the cars feel similar, because many cars feel similar based on their drivetrain type when you're pushing them to those sorts of levels. The distinguishing characteristics are tyre types, suspension types and weight distributions, all of which can be very subtle. I agree that there are lots of cars that feel similar (hello Japanese boxes!), but I think it's because mechanically they actually are. If I can feel differences driving a Camaro, a Challenger and a GT500 then it can't be all bad.

 

[boxox]

It's complicated.

The devs said, as compared to GTR2

Tyres, when properly interacting with asphalt grip/slide/slide/slip/regrip and so forth, and with driver input, are very controllable, this goes especially for race cars with slicks. Not only have sim games not compensating for the lack of g forces etc. but they've been making the cars spin out too easily. If any pit crew gave a real race driver a car that handled like that, he/she would take it right back and tell them to fix it.
I'll say it here ... when the team were at Blimey!, they did probably more than 99 percent of the development on GTR2. GTR2 was too hard. It was too hard because the physics engine was lacking in some areas, wasn't measuring enough parameters quickly enough and in the correct way. Real cars are easy to drive, slow and fast ... take any car on a track with some cheap slicks, and you can abuse it to hell and back, slide all over the place, but under steering and throttle control. You need a skid pan to induce the leery spins I see in some so-called realistic racing games. You'll see what I mean you play SHIFT. It's a generation ahead in this area.

Many of the team race often and feel we’ve gotten closer than anyone else. I maintain that GTR2 was too difficult. I’ve yet to have a car break away on track as suddenly as we had it in GTR2. The reality is that a road and race tuned car is fairly easy to drive to the edge and slightly beyond. They tend to scrub off speed if understeering or oversteering and with the right inputs for oversteer, are generally easily righted. We don’t have fudged ‘aids’ in pro mode. What is in the game is a direct result of what we feel are authentic physics.

...

we as a team (most of the GTR2 devs) always felt that the grip, slip, scrub, regrip behaviour of pretty much any car wasn’t there in the competition, thus the new tyre model among other things. With the exception of some of the physics, the engine is all new though.

...

We have tested back to back and while scrubbing or gentle drifting gives you the fastest times, full out sliding doesn’t. This is how we wanted it.

I agree that in enhancing the feeling of being on the edge we did some things that make you feel the car is skidding a touch more than it probably is. Things like the scrub sound and tyre smoke. We did this (among other things) to give the player adequate warning that the tyres were losing grip. It comes some small way to compensating for the lack of g-force or proprioceptive feedback.




Personally I have to agree there, at least from my experience of chucking cars around just for fun rather than necessarily racing them, I would be dead about a billion times now if breakaways were so sudden and violent as they are in some 'sim' games.

It's a different matter coming from console games. I don't know of anything on the PC that is designed around this 'active steer' concept console games are fond of using - you have various steer help aids, but they're like they are in Shift, it's steering help to steer the car along the track, not steering help to prevent you from exceeding a certain slip angle on a gamepad. I don't know how they could have handled this other than forcing people to drive a 'semipro' setting before they allowed you to totally disable computer aided steering.

To be honest I'm not totally sold on GT or Forza being particularly "sims" myself - probably not such a popular opinion here but I've seen too much on youtube of cars moving independently of any controlled contact with the ground to rate them much above 'convincing fake'.

 

[freshseth83]

GT is much more closer to real life than any racing 'game'. Maybe some of the PC sims are closer to the handling but there is no substitute for Gran Turismo. Even F1 drivers play Gran Turismo and complement how real it is. Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel are two of the more famous names that play it very often. Shift has the tendency to slide around, no matter what car you use. The steering input is definitely off no matter what you do to change it. A contant steering ratio is no use because the car will oversteer and slide or spin out. Putting down power with any car is impossible to do flat out, unless you have superior gearing skills in tune with the limited slip. Shift to me is one of the weakest 'sims' out there. But I'm not wasting money on anything else until GT5 comes out.

 

[boxox]

I think Shift actually has some nice pissing contest credentials myself

Physics lead is an ex SCCA driver / race suspension builder

Project lead is a GT3 team manager

Base engine is a cousin to RFactor Pro (you know those sim runthroughs you're seeing on the red bull simulator this f1 season? that's the one )

Physics and dev staff from RBR, GTL, GTR, GTR2, which accounts for around half of the best regarded driving sims on PC.

I think some of the PR is pretty cynical around these games. Kazunori driving around Nordschleife does not mean this happens.

 

[Scaff]

man did you have ta dig up this time sensitive thred that had to do with the relese of the game before the game was embraced by the people who can tell the difference. Your inexperence w/ the game is truly evedent and your standing alone. Let this thred die

You are not a member of staff, so please do not tell other members when and how they should post.

If you have an issue with a post, use the report button, its the reason we have it.

For the record the site has a policy of preferring old threads to be resurrected, if the members has something to add (and that was the case here), rather than starting new threads.

However as you seem intent on drawing attention to yourself in this way I would ask you to follow the AUP yourself. It quite clearly states that good basic grammar is to be used and that you do not use text-speak. Your post breaks both these areas of the AUP, please ensure it does not happen again.


Scaff

 

[Imari]

The steering input is definitely off no matter what you do to change it. A contant steering ratio is no use because the car will oversteer and slide or spin out. Putting down power with any car is impossible to do flat out, unless you have superior gearing skills in tune with the limited slip.

In what way are any of these things true? Steering input may be off with a pad, but that's the nature of pads. With a wheel properly set up it seems fine to me.

Putting down the power is again a matter of skill and finesse, as it should be. I assume you're talking about the high-powered stuff because getting the power down from a Focus isn't exactly rocket science.

GT does a lot of things right, but it has flaws like any other game. And it just so happens that Shift does some of those things right. I find Shift's tyre physics to be excellent, the sounds are superb, and when playing with force feedback the cars have a sense of weight that is almost entirely absent from GT5P.

I'm fairly willing to believe based on past efforts that the people who made Shift know exactly how to make a sim-based racer, and any parts of Shift that are less simmy than they could be are by design to make the game more enjoyable.

 

[LeftyWright69]

However as you seem intent on drawing attention to yourself in this way I would ask you to follow the AUP yourself. It quite clearly states that good basic grammar is to be used and that you do not use text-speak. Your post breaks both these areas of the AUP, please ensure it does not happen again.

Scaff

Looks like I stepped in it again

 

[freshseth83]

What? More enjoyable? so you call sliding around in corners and tracks with bumps that excessively throw your car off balance enjoyable? You call flying in the air from a tap enjoyable?

No game is perfect I know, GT is far from it, but at least for the common user of the game you don't have to worry about oversteer with a control pad. I'm not a casual race game fan. I pay attention to the way these games handle compared to real life and it's hard to say Shift is closer to reality. Maybe the wheel is the way to go, but for the mass audience of people, they're not going out to purchase another peripheral for another game. At least most of the people I know don't. Point is, to make a game enjoyable there is a lot they could have done to change the characteristics of how the cars behave and how the input from the pad works. I said nothing about the wheel before. I'm not going to purchase something for 100 bucks or whatever the price may be for a game like shift that you can beat in a week.

 

[ItsHim]

It's a great game. Not epic, but still fills all my needs.

Seems bashing Shift, which sells for 20€ now, never grows old. Well, Genesis was never the same after Peter left, was it?

 

[mani_23]

In what way are any of these things true? Steering input may be off with a pad, but that's the nature of pads. With a wheel properly set up it seems fine to me.

Putting down the power is again a matter of skill and finesse, as it should be. I assume you're talking about the high-powered stuff because getting the power down from a Focus isn't exactly rocket science.

GT does a lot of things right, but it has flaws like any other game. And it just so happens that Shift does some of those things right. I find Shift's tyre physics to be excellent, the sounds are superb, and when playing with force feedback the cars have a sense of weight that is almost entirely absent from GT5P.

I'm fairly willing to believe based on past efforts that the people who made Shift know exactly how to make a sim-based racer, and any parts of Shift that are less simmy than they could be are by design to make the game more enjoyable.

Although I Understand your opinions, I still find it baffling that you can be quite the opposite of what I have ever believed in shift. The fact that the cars don't have weight, and that the wheel makes the car feel a bit more weightless. And that Gran turismo can successfully represent this weight very well, Indeed making the cars feel heavy in a very reasonable way(but thats ok). Anyways, Im not trying to start fights. Just amusing.

 

[thefast1]

I really hate these threads if you dont like the game dont play it, dont be involved with it, DONT PLAY IT simple as.

The NFS franchise has never been about pure racing as long as its been on play station and x box, its about pure fun.
And nfs shift does that perfectly well, its fun to go round corners silly fast its fun to slide side ways round corners, when i want serious game play i play the likes of GTR evo.

And to any one who says the cars all feel the same are so wrong how the hell can you say somthing like the viper or the zo6 handles the same as say the audi R8 you obviously have not played the game properly.

And the bump jump issues only happen on certain car and track combos and there not fixed problems they can be avoided by taking a different line.

All in all nfs shift has its problems what game does not ???? but the direction nfs is going in is a good direction and considering this is only there second game of this type were its all track racing and tuning i think there doing pritty well and i look forward to the next game which i will gladly hand my cash over for.

 

[HeadsoupBob]

I think when people here state their argument for or against Shift, they need to specify how they race... i.e. cockpit/bonnet/chase cam, no assists/some assists. There's a very big difference in Shift's 'feeling' depending on which view and assists are used.

Driving with dfpro from cockpit view, the 'feeling' of going fast and being at the limit was much better than the stale driving in GT and Forza. But what threw me was when I watched the replay and the car seemed to be constantly sideways, smoke and all. I felt driving from the cockpit did a pretty good job of portraying lateral forces, if only the outside view didn't show this as drifting...

I also think there is just a little bit too much grip, it shouldn't be quite so easy to control the slides, and slamming the accelerator doesn't cause wheelspin enough in more powerful cars.

 

[LeftyWright69]

The Shift game and the people who play it remind me of when I first got bit by the motorcycle racing bug. There are people who ride motorcycles and enjoy the wind in their face, people who ride motorcycles and try to go fast and never will, people who race motorcycles because riding isn’t racing but they will never be a pro, and finally people who race motorcycles at the pro level and are able to see the difference between the groups. In other words until you have given what it takes to understand what it takes you will never have what it takes to do what it takes to have any success with what it takes.

 

[boxox]

You call flying in the air from a tap enjoyable?

Obviously nobody could claim a game featuring something like that was a sim

I think the strange thing about advocacy wars is the implicit assumption that criticism of one game is in contrast to some magical other game with absolutely no defects. Even development of cluster based full motion platform single car simulators with automotive and aeronautic engineers, professional coders, mathematicians, and real F1 drivers and crews aren't static, there is always something you could do better or represent differently.

SMS's previous games, and Eero's work on RBR, are all praised as highly accurate. But none of them are identical to each other, even GTR>GTR2, which had largely the same cars in largely the same engine, had a lot of differences and caused splits in opinion in the sim community. But GTR was never perfect and neither was GTR2, and in 2011 I am sure you will see some slightly different things in Shift 2, just as a matter of what they learned making Shift 1.

 

[boxox]

I think when people here state their argument for or against Shift, they need to specify how they race... i.e. cockpit/bonnet/chase cam, no assists/some assists. There's a very big difference in Shift's 'feeling' depending on which view and assists are used.

From what SMS has said, my impression of how they did this was essentially splitting up testers into focus groups - race drivers vs racing game fans vs casual gamers - and based the physics in large part over what each group 'felt' was right, rather than just plugging in numbers and matching it vs telemetry as they've used previously. So for example their race drivers thought the coefficient of friction between the tyres and the ground was better at between 15 and 20% more than is actually reported via the engine, so that's what they went with for 'pro' mode (they went with the 20% group).

There are all sorts of things that are very hard to impossible to actually simulate properly in a computer-based engine - or rather - extremely computationally expensive to do them in real time. So for example when the suspension bends, the energy transfer is 100% efficient - the game doesn't find out what frequency of sound would be generated by that motion, or how much heat is produced by a spring at that tension and airflow would cool the it, or whatever. So there are always going to be these little mini-black-holes where real life forces go missing or need to be made up some other way. Even if you accounted for all the atoms making up the car you'd still be boned because you'd be excluding, whatever, let's say, brownian motion from the hydraulics system from it (though shift does actually assign a weight an inertia to the fuel in the tank )

It's the same everywhere in all games. I think getting it 90% there and then going to real drivers for 'feel' is as good a method of any of making up that ground.